Marta and the Demons Page 5

using our system,’ I said grimly. ‘Those old monks on the snowy peaks. They will be partnering with us. What have you got to lose?’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m interested,’ said the maker of the teach-yourself-jujitsu app, more frostily than ever. As frosty as those monks are snowy.

  ‘I know this might not be a conventional pitch,’ I said, ‘but I challenge you to single combat?’

   

  §

   

  ‘I won’t say a spark of attraction flew up.’

  Carly gave me a cuddle. ‘You give ’em cute speeches, don’tcha? Like the one you gave me.’

  I was mystified.

  ‘The big show-off cute speech, with all the facts in it. Making me take you all serious.’

  ‘When was this? I don’t remember this.’

  ‘Just this one time. “Flash! There is no such thing as a real bee!” That kind of thing.’

  ‘I have been known to hustle some custom,’ I admitted.

   

  §

   

  We also sniffed at the Monetrize roadkill.

  ‘You used to be partnered with Monetrize,’ I said to the maker of the manage-your-anxiety app. ‘What happened to that relationship?’

  ‘Oh, Monetrize,’ she said. ‘Monetrize.’

  ‘I don’t mean to ambulance-chase here –’ (business people love it when you throw in loads of random metaphors, they don’t have to make sense) ‘– but Monetrize had an awesome concept, but absolutely no interest in the customer. Their corporate culture is all about the nut burying the squirrel.’

  ‘The nut, um –’

  ‘Over in the Dispossession world, squirrels bury nuts. Then it’s up to that nut, if it needs to bury a squirrel of its own, it has that freedom. And by nuts I mean numbers. Did you know Monetrize kept all the shortfall from customers who missed their targets? That they didn’t reward customers who exceeded their targets? That they released the customers’ deposits on a parabolic scale? So when the customer was halfway to their target, Monetrize still held onto three-quarters of the deposit? Monetrize essentially made malware.’

  ‘Okay, but you’re basically like Monetrize?’ said the maker of the manage-your-anxiety app.

  Maybe she didn’t like change.

  ‘Nobody likes change,’ I said gently. Then I ramped it up. ‘Except how about spare change? With our Dispossession model, money from users who miss their targets is redistributed to users who exceed their targets. Only a small proportion, about 25%, gets reserved for our running costs, revenue for our partners,’ – I lingered meaningfully on that bit – ‘and charitable donations.’

  ‘Okay, but you’re basically like Monetrize?’ insisted the maker of the manage-your-anxiety app.

  ‘No,’ I bellowed. ‘Our philosophy is different. Monetrize, wanton and goatish for value, would fain blackmail your very users – or at least get them to blackmail themselves – into using your anxiety management service. We believe people have to want to use your anxiety management service in the first place. But if they do want to use it – then you can offer them that extra thrill. How about it? How about offering them that extra thrill? Don’t you think it’s about time you offered them that extra thrill? . . . Are you still there? Say if you are. It’s okay to say if you are.’

   

   

   

  III. Options

   

  The app became way, way more than an app because we kept other people’s money, and partnered with other companies’ products. It turns out that’s way, way, waaaay complicated.

  Weird fact: soon I started neglecting Dispossession Ltd.

  At that stage, I still didn’t realise how important it was. And when I got some “real work” – not the itty bitty snip-snip here and a couple of tra-la-las I’d been getting on Giggl and GigTwig – no, a whole three weeks’ worth A/B testing for an insurance firm – practically a career, right? – well, it became easy to forgot I was also a CEO.

  Like Dispossession was some old blog, some outgrown fandom.

  Anyway, Marta and Li Shu were having real problems. The Home Office had decided Marta had to go live in Portugal and Li Shu had to go live in China.

  It couldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen. Something so stupid. No. It was obviously a mix-up. Like a typo or something: you can tell from just looking at it that it’s wrong, and you don’t have to take it seriously. Nobody will expect you to.

  Yes they will.

  One Sunday morning in Marta’s apartment. Her visa ran out in April. I ranted and raved. I was gonna organize rolling protests and clandestine direct action. We needed to brainstorm spectacular, hilarious stuff the media couldn’t ignore. Everyone would be asking, where will they strike next? The online campaign would be huge. Sometimes you need to go viral as a bare minimum, just to keep reality intact. A petition with thousands of signatures to shame the Home Secretary. ‘You are meant to be a secretary of homes!’

  We’d crowdsource a war chest. We’d get testimonials from everyone who knew Marta. About how amazing she was, about everything she gave to this city, this country, about how this country was pointless and stupid without her, how nobody could ever want to live here without her. We’d even get testimonials from racists explaining that Marta wasn’t who they meant when they were being racist –

  Marta grabbed me.

  Caught me up in her arms, a big full hug so our bodies were touching all the way down. Her cheek, hot and wet with tears, was all up in my hair. But her voice was calm and firm and – faraway.

  ‘You don’t got to do that, Myeong! They put it in my file, even if I don’t do nothing myself.’ She rocked me gently, and I let myself be rocked. ‘Then all I get from the Border Agency is, “Oh, so you want to stay here?” If you did that, I could never come home. Not even as a tourist.’

  I said, ‘We have to do something.’

  She let go, pushed me to arms-length, hands on my shoulders. ‘You do anything, I go to live in the airport, being interviewed, forever. That is my life, like a famous person, just interviews.’

  I said, ‘What’s going to happen?’

  ‘I’ll go away for a bit, and then I’ll come back. I will come back. That’s all.’

   

  §

   

  Despite all that, Dispossession Ltd. tinkled along in the background. Li Shu and her uni confidantes tinkered with code and supplied cool tech support. Sometimes I’d forward a lead to Marta and Narnia, and they’d try to tempt a new partner to bolt Dispossession onto their tool or service.

  Things pootled along. Narnia knew all this homeopathy stuff. She always tried to explain what we did in terms of homeopathy. ‘Your in-game currency only requires the memory of the structure of money,’ she would say. ‘And then it can retain the healing properties of money.’

  Narnia’s method worked sometimes, mainly if the other person was also really into homeopathy. It was like that high-risk pick-up line Carly had used on me all those years ago. At that awful LGBT spoken word festival.

  ‘Hey – do we – is your name . . . Elizabeth?’

  Did I look like an Elizabeth? ‘Oh my God. Did you literally just guess a random name?’

  Anyway, I think we all thought of Dispossession in our own different ways. And I don’t think any of us really realised its potential.

  The financial quarter came, and we got our daffodils and, perhaps, our dividends.

  ‘Whoa,’ I said. ‘It’s actually made a profit!’

  We studied stats. Over a hundred partners had pimped their gamified client experience with our pledge system.

  ‘What do we do?’ said Carly. ‘Dividends? Reinvest?’

  She was weirdly bewildered.

  ‘Can we have like an . . . AGM?’

  ‘This week’s busy for me,’ said Carly.

  ‘Also, I’ve had . . . a sort of new idea.’

   

  §

   

  Only Marta managed to m
ake it to the Dispossession AGM. She was dressed like someone dressed up as a hot businesswoman for Halloween.

  I unveiled my big idea. ‘Let’s issue more shares in the company, get more good techie people in. Li Shu can find them. And then . . . we go after the big games. Never mind all this fuddy-duddy, gamified, making-flossing-fun, improve-the-way-you-sit bullcrap. All platforms, millions and millions of fans.’

  Marta crinkled her brow. ‘So you wanna do it like, uh, the gold in Dwarf Fortunes, or whatever, is actually worth a little bit for real?’

  ‘Yeah. Pokemon, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Second Life, Call of Duty, the whole shebang. If players will pay upfront, to get their projected gameplay backed with real currency, then why not?’

  Marta clucked impatiently. ‘Why would anyone put down thaaat deposit? It’s different. They just want to play the game. They play it for fun. They want to play it. It’s a game.’

  I nodded. ‘Marta, your game was fleeing demons, which was actually – let me check – oh yeah, not fun, it turned out?’

  ‘Demons,’ Marta confirmed.

  ‘And as for the other games . . . grinding levels, faction quests, pharming, levelling toons, raiding for tokens. Yeah, real fun. Games aren’t just fun, Marta. We tell ourselves they are, because we’re scared of the truth. They’re . . . compulsion. They’re immersion. They’re structure. They’re spirit. They’re us.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Newsflash,’ I added.

  ‘Marta,’ Carly purred. ‘Myeong thinks games are about more than fun. I don’t know if I believe her. But hon, why did you put down a deposit with that running app? You wanted to get super-fit, right?’

  ‘I wanted to get thin,’ Marta corrected. Marta has terrible body politics. But then, we all need to heal. ‘It’s